Martin Sandberger
Martin Sandberger was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era and a convicted Holocaust perpetrator. He was the commander of Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A, as well as of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD at the time of Nazi German occupation of Estonia during World War II. Sandberger perpetrated mass murder of the Jews in German-occupied Latvia and Estonia. As the Gestapo chief in Verona, he was also responsible for the arrest of Jews in Italy, and their deportation to Auschwitz concentration camp. Sandberger was the second-highest official of the Einsatzgruppe A to be tried and convicted. He was also the last-surviving defendant from the Nuremberg Military Tribunals.
Background and early career
Martin Sandberger was born in Charlottenburg, Berlin as a son of a director of IG Farben. Sandberger studied law at the Universities of München, Köln, Freiburg and Tübingen.At the age of 20 he joined the Nazi Party and the SA. From 1932 to 1933, Sandberger was a Nazi student activist and student leader in Tübingen. On 8 March 1933, Sandberger and fellow student Erich Ehrlinger raised the Nazi flag in front of the main building at the University of Tübingen.
By 1935, he had obtained his doctor of law degree. As a functionary of the Nazi student League, he eventually became a university inspector. In 1936. he became an enlisted member of the SS and came under the command of Gustav Adolf Scheel for the SD in Württemberg.
He began a career with the SD and, by 1938, he had risen to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer. Sandberger worked as an assistant judge for the Interior Ministry of Württemberg and was appointed as a Regierungsrat in 1937.
Activities during the Second World War
Following the German invasion and occupation of Poland in September 1939, Heinrich Himmler embarked on a program, known as Heim ins Reich which involved driving out the native population in areas of Poland and replacing them with ethnic Germans from various countries, such as the Baltic states and Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. On 13 October 1939 Himmler appointed Sandberger the chief of the Northeast Central Immigration Office and tasked with the "racial evaluation" of the various Volksdeutsche immigrants. Sandberger also performed this task in western Prussia, deporting Jews from Schneidemühl to Lublin to enable Baltic Germans to be settled there. In May 1940, he was transferred to Alsace after the fall of France to perform the same function. In April 1941, Himmler assigned him to coordinate the removal of Slovenes from northern Slovenia following the German defeat of Yugoslavia.In June 1941, Sandberger was appointed chief of Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A. During the first two weeks of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941, Sandberger traveled with Franz Walter Stahlecker, the commander of Einsatzgruppe A. Sandberger was involved since March 1941 in the distribution of a business plan for the RSHA and a director of the curriculum organization of the schools.
Knowledge of the Führer Order
The Nazi organization most responsible for carrying out The Holocaust in the Baltic states was the Security Service, generally referred to by its initials SD. The SD, which organized the Einsatzgruppen, conducted itself in accordance with the understanding that a fundamental order, sometimes called a Führer Order existed to kill the Jews. Sandberger received his knowledge of the Führer order from Bruno Streckenbach, an official with Department IV of the Reich Security Main Office. According to Sandberger's testimony as an accused in the Einsatzgruppen trial after the war, Streckenbach gave a speech about the Führer order, which Sandberger attended. Streckenbach also gave Sandberger explicit instructions in a personal conversation:Transfer to Estonia
Sandberger entered Riga with Einsatzkommando 1a and 2. These organizations then engaged indestruction of synagogues, the liquidation of 400 Jews, and the setting up of groups for the purpose of fomenting pogroms. After the war, when on trial for war crimes, Sandberger's effort to evade responsibility was rejected by the tribunal: "Although it has been demonstrated that not only he was in Riga at the time they occurred, but he actually had a conversation about them with the Einsatzgruppe Chief Stahlecker before he left Riga."
In early July 1941, Sandberger was sent to Estonia on the orders of Stahlecker. According to Sandberger's later testimony, Stahlecker made it clear that Sandberger was being sent to Estonia to carry out the Führer order in that country. A variety of shooting actions of Jews, Romani, Communists and the mentally-ill began once Sandberger and his kommando entered Estonia. A report dated 15 October 1941 on executions in Ostland during Sandberger's tenure included one item under Estonia of 474 Jews and 684 Communists.
Others were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Report No. 17, dated 9 July 1941 carried the item —
On 10 September 1941, Sandberger promulgated a general order for the internment of Jews which resulted in the internment of 450 Jews in a concentration camp at Pskov, Russia. The Jews were later executed.
Sandburger was highly recommended for promotion in the SS:
On 3 December 1941, Sandberger was appointed Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD for Estonia, now known as the Generalbezirk Estland. Throughout the winter, he continued murdering Estonian Jews, including those who had been deployed as forced laborers. In a report of 1 July 1942, he claimed that Estonia was Judenfrei.
Actions in Italy
Sandberger returned to Germany in September 1943. In the fall of 1943, Sandberger was appointed the Gestapo chief for the Italian city of Verona. In this capacity he was involved in arresting the Jews of northern Italy and organizing their transportation to Auschwitz concentration camp.Espionage activity
In January 1944, Sandberger became head of the Department A in the Reich Security Main Office Amt. VI ; in this position he reported directly to Walter Schellenberg. He kept the domestic and foreign accounts and financial records of the organization. As the first assistant to Schellenberg, Sandberger acted as his liaison man with Heinrich Himmler.With all the access he had had to highly secret information, after the war, under British interrogation, Sandberger tried to delay or avoid prosecution by disclosing what he knew. Until internal reports of the Einsatzgruppen were discovered, Sandberger was able to convince the British interpreters that his account of his activities in Tallinn as the Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei had involved "'no evidence of any particular criminal actions on his part.'"
Trial
In the Einsatzgruppen trial, Sandberger was charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in a criminal organization, that is, the SS. At his trial, Sandberger denied responsibility for the killings described in the 15 October report and sought to blame the German field police and Estonian home guard. This was rejected by the tribunal, which found that the Estonian home guard was under Sandberger's jurisdiction and control for specific operations, as shown by the same report. Similarly, Sandberger claimed he had arrested the Jews sent to Pskov to protect them, hoping that during the internment the Führer order might be revoked or meliorated and he was not in general responsible for their execution at the Pskov detention camp. Sandberger said he was responsible for "only a fraction" of the killings. Sandberger estimated this "fraction" at 300 to 350 persons.Sandberger claimed the execution of the Jews at Pskov happened in his absence and without his knowledge. The tribunal found that Sandberger's own testimony convicted him:
Sandberger testified that he had protested against the inhumanity of the Führer order, but his account was not accepted by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal which was conducting the trial: "Despite the defendant's protestations from the witness stand, it is evident from the documentary evidence and his own testimony, that he went along willingly with the execution of the Fuehrer Order."
Death sentence and reprieve
Sandberger was found guilty on all counts. In September 1947,Judge Michael Musmanno pronounced the tribunal's sentence:
Despite political pressures, General Lucius D. Clay confirmed Sandberger's death sentence in 1949. In 1951, Sandberger's sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment by the "Peck Panel" clemency board acting under the authority of John J. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany. McCloy had received political pressure to grant the reprieve from William Langer, U.S. Senator from North Dakota. Many of Langer's constituents were of German descent, and Langer felt that trial of anyone other than the highest Nazis was contrary to American legal tradition and helped Communism.
Sandberger's father, a retired production director of IG Farben, used his connections with West German president Theodor Heuss. Heuss in turn contacted the US Ambassador at that time James B. Conant with the request for pardon. Numerous pleas for leniency from influential individuals including Minister of Justice Wolfgang Haußmann and Landesbischof Martin Haug were made. The renowned lawyer and vice-president of the West German parliament Carlo Schmid worried about Sandberger's conditions in Landsberg Prison and spoke out in favor of a commutation. Over time these and other well-connected people lobbied for Sandberger's early release. By late 1957, there were only four war criminals held in prison in West Germany. One of them was Sandberger. He had been denied parole several times. In 1958 the Federal Foreign Office filed parole applications on the behalf of all four inmates still serving time in Landsberg Prison. Sandberger was denied parole, but the board unanimously voted for his life sentence and that of the other three to be commuted to time served. The commutations became official on 6 May 1958, and Sandberger was released three days later. Subsequently, through the mediation of Bernhard Müller, he received a position as legal counsel in the Lechler Group.
Until 1972, Sandberger was repeatedly called as a witness in Nazi war crimes trials, such as in 1958 in the trial against the "Einsatzkommando Tilsit", the so-called Einsatzgruppen trial, in Ulm. A prosecution by the public prosecutor's offices in Munich and Stuttgart for his responsibility for the "shooting of numerous persons, including communists, Jews and parachutists in the years 1941 – 1943" was discontinued. The reason was that Sandberger had already been convicted in 1948 in the trial before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. This excludes prosecution by German judicial authorities in accordance with the 1955 Treaty on the Regulation of Questions of War and Occupation, the so-called Transition Treaty. Sandberger was believed to be the highest-ranking member of the SS still known to be alive. He died on 30 March 2010, at the age of 98.